Ready To Roll The Houston Rockets, retrofitted with a new alltime great, began their scramble for the title as the abridged NBA season opened

They had to scramble a little, but the Houston Rockets didgather their usual troika of Top 50 talent by tip-off. HakeemOlajuwon, Charles Barkley and now, in place of the retired ClydeDrexler, Scottie Pippen. You've got to hand it to the Rockets:When it comes to restocking, they go big-ticket. For thatmatter, when it comes to superstars, they go redundant. How manyof the NBA's greatest players does a team need, anyway?

Based on the early returns, either one more or one fewer. Afterlosing its opener to the Lakers in Los Angeles and then escapingwith a road win over the Golden State Warriors, Houston looked alittle confused, as if there might not be room for everybody.Maybe after just two weeks of preparation for thislockout-shortened season, everybody was out of whack. But what'sthe sense of putting three surefire Hall of Famers together ifthe game is going to fall into the hands of Cuttino Mobley?

Mobley hasn't even been in the NBA long enough to be calledMoms, and the best thing Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich can sayabout him is that "he's the most-talked-about second-round pickwe've ever had in camp." Yet it was Mobley, a rookie guard outof Rhode Island making his NBA debut last Saturday night, whosaved Houston from the most expensive 0-2 start in leaguehistory. With two of the three Top 50 guys disappearing into thefloorboards, Mobley took a pass from Barkley down low to hit a25-footer with 19.1 seconds left that ended up beating theWarriors 86-84. "Mobley?" said Barkley after the game. "I didn'tknow it was Mobley I was passing to. I'd have kept the ball ifI'd known that."

Barkley was kidding, sort of, but you have to wonder how theRockets can let the outcome of any of their games depend on asecond-round draft pick. Given that one immortal has been swappedout for an improved model, about all that would be acceptable inHouston is total domination. And not by Moms Mobley.

"This league isn't so easy," says Tomjanovich, "that you canjust throw guys together and, after two weeks, beat everybodyup." Still, what was the point of bringing Pippen into this foldif he wasn't going to at least outplay teammates like MichaelDickerson--a rookie guard from Arizona who scored 12 to Pippen's10 in the 99-91 loss to the Lakers last Friday--and Mobley, whogot the clutch baskets on Saturday?

O.K., maybe Pippen had an off night or two, maybe it reallyisn't that easy, after a decade of playing in the free-flowingtriangle offense with the Bulls, to come to a team withestablished low-post stars like Olajuwon and Barkley and figureout your role. Nobody's writing off Pippen, who helped MichaelJordan to six NBA titles. Talent is always the way to go, andPippen has it in every dimension. As it is, his aims are modest:"I bring some defensive character to this team--they alreadyhave two Hall of Famers, remember--and maybe some energy." Butthis isn't a season (How many games are in it? Fifty?) whenanybody's going to be patient, or settle for modesty.

To be even fairer, it wasn't just Pippen who vanished from thelineup. Olajuwon had games of 11 and 12 points, the lattercoming against the Warriors' less-than-formidable Erick Dampier.Remember, too, that Olajuwon's scoring average has dropped ineach of the last three seasons, hitting a career-low 16.4 pointsper game in 1997-98, when he underwent surgery on his left kneeand missed 33 games. The combined noneffect of Pippen andOlajuwon in the game against the Lakers--the two contributed 21points--had everybody putting L.A.'s Kobe Bryant and ShaquilleO'Neal directly into the Hall of Fame. Bryant, who just passedfrom teenhood last August, was the more impressive athlete inhis matchup with Pippen, blocking two of Pippen's shots andgenerally bedeviling him. Shaq, who scored 30, made everybodyforget the Dream.

If it hadn't been for Barkley, who through Sunday had beenplaying an even bigger game than he talks, the Rockets would havehad to go into crisis mode. Relatively slimmed down and with atleast one visible ab on him, Barkley played Houston's first twogames more like an exuberant rookie than the 35-year-old ball ofremorse he actually is. To see him drop 31 points on Shaq and Co.and then, the next night, watch him score eight points in a 15-0fourth-quarter run that finally got the Rockets the lead (hefinished with 18 points and 20 rebounds) is to marvel at hiscompetitive spirit.

Barkley's bluster starts to make sense after games like those.His stabs at humility become more debatable. "Couldn't go threegames in three nights," he says, referring to splotches ofcompressed scheduling ahead. "I don't think I can have sex threedays in a row. Not good sex, anyway." That's for some othermagazine to decide, but at this point it looks as if he can puttogether as many good games as he wants.

As Pippen works to put a couple of his own together, it's worthnoting that even if his shots aren't dropping, he has alreadybeen a huge influence on this team. His arrival galvanized alargely discouraged Barkley, who was seriously consideringretirement in the off-season. "Last year's team wasn't fun,"Barkley says, referring to locker room tension and injuries tohimself and others. "If Hakeem hadn't been hurt, I'd have hadsurgery in December [for a hernia, rather than wait until lastJune]." He admits he might never have come back.

Drexler's retirement eased the tension. He had a brittlerelationship with Barkley that helped to sink the Rockets'morale. "It was a little tough at times," says 16-year veteranswingman Eddie Johnson, "but I've been on teams that were worse."

There seems to be no question, though, that he's now on a teamthat's better. Everybody agrees that it's happier. "Let's not usethe word happy," Tomjanovich says. "Let's use the wordchemistry."

Even with Drexler gone, Barkley wasn't coming back just for theatmosphere. "If we don't sign a good free agent," Tomjanovichsays, "he's probably gone."

Pippen was everybody's favorite free agent, and, with Jordanretired, he was looking to get out of Chicago on the next train.Of course, even after the Rockets worked a sign-and-trade dealwith the Bulls for Pippen, parting with forward Roy Rogers and asecond-round draft choice, Barkley wasn't guaranteed to return.It was one thing to persuade him to take a cut from $2.2 millionto $1 million for the year, creating $10.6 million under the capfor Pippen. It was another to find him.

While everybody else was getting ready for camp, Barkley waspaired with Jordan in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in LaQuinta, Calif., his cell phone off. Despairing of usual means ofcommunication, the Rockets dispatched a messenger, and the daycamp opened Barkley signed his contract at the 10th tee of theTamarisk Country Club, Michael ribbing him all the while.

In Barkley's defense, golf or not, he had prepared for thisseason like no other. Ripped by his friend Jordan for hislong-standing disdain for conditioning, Barkley spent a week inDecember at a Los Angeles spiritual retreat, where he had anapple for breakfast, hiked for 15 miles before lunch and thencame back to the spa for a bowl of soup. He did yoga, too, untilhe began having visions. "Of Big Macs and fries," he says.

The upshot is that he lost 17 pounds and gained leg strength."I'm all muscle," he says. (The revelation, of course, is thatin all those previous seasons, he really had let himself go.)But the big story can't possibly be that Barkley got away fromhis routine of 20 Diet Cokes a day, found some kind of religionand is kicking the NBA up one court and down the other. UnlessPippen was a figment of Jordan's imagination all those years,this will be the Year of Scottie. Assuming, that is, he findsthe flow in this outfit.

Points or not, last week he was already ecstatic about thechange. Talking to Houston reporters, he said, "This experiencehas been beyond my wildest expectations. I feel so relaxed, socomfortable, so wanted." Pippen was taking direct aim at theBulls, who refused to upgrade his relatively piddling contract,which averaged $3.6 million a year, and didn't so much as wincewhen he decided to leave. "Let's face it," he said, "theorganization up there stinks."

The one down south has made the 33-year-old Pippen so happy thathe has decided to make Houston his home, presumably for the restof his career. He will likely outlast the other immortals on theRockets, just as he outlasted the one in Chicago, and nobody'sbetting that he won't outlast his two-game funk either. Afterundergoing surgery last July to remove two herniated disks inhis back, he seems to be moving as well as ever, and streaks ofpoor shooting (he was 9 for 29 from the floor in Houston's firsttwo games) weren't uncommon for him even when he was winningtitles in Chicago.

In the meantime Pippen has become the kind of generous teammatethat Barkley and Tomjanovich have long dreamed of. "I'd heardonly good things about Scottie," Tomjanovich says, "but he'smuch better than I thought."

This season, though, the crowd's going to be a little tougher,and the schedule's going to be crueler, especially on old legs.To barely split a pair of games, Houston's Top 50 guys had toslog for an average of 37.3 minutes. So if Pippen has any moregood deeds in mind, they had better be more along the line ofthrees with a half-minute left than inspirationalbehind-the-scenes gestures. Or else we're going to find out justhow good this Moms Mobley really is.

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN W. MCDONOUGH Ball of fire Barkley was on top of his game--and Dampier--in a win at Golden State.COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN W. MCDONOUGH Not-so-great Scottie The Lakers' Bryant easily maneuvered around Pippen, who failed to achieve liftoff in his Rockets debut.COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN W. MCDONOUGH Less round mound The slimmer Barkley showed he can still feast on rebounds, pulling down 35 in two games.COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN W. MCDONOUGH Bad dream Olajuwon, whose scoring average has been declining for three seasons, was constantly on his heels against O'Neal.

"It isn't that easy, that you can throw guys together and, aftertwo weeks, beat everybody up."